Upbit and Bithumb Split Over Whether BONK’s Problems Were Resolved
Upbit ended trading support for Bonk (BONK) on Monday, removing the Solana-based memecoin from its won and USDT markets after concluding that concerns stemming from a roughly $20 million attack on BonkDAO had not been sufficiently resolved.
Trading in BONK/KRW and BONK/USDT ended at 15:00 Korea Standard Time on September 7, with outstanding buy and sell orders in the affected markets cancelled as part of the process. Upbit had announced the decision a month earlier, on August 7.
Customers are not required to remove their tokens immediately. Upbit will continue supporting BONK withdrawals until October 7, creating a one-month period during which holdings can still be moved to another exchange or external wallet even though they can no longer be traded on Upbit.
The delisting is notable because Bithumb, another major South Korean exchange, reached precisely the opposite conclusion after reviewing the same underlying concerns.
Bithumb removed BONK from its trading-caution list on August 7, saying it determined that the reasons for the designation had been resolved. It resumed deposits at 16:00 KST that day and has continued supporting BONK trading.
Both exchanges had originally reacted in similar fashion.
Bithumb placed BONK under trading caution on July 7 after identifying a security incident involving wallets or distributed-ledger infrastructure associated with the asset, alongside concerns that information capable of materially affecting the token’s value had not been disclosed appropriately or promptly.
It had already temporarily suspended BONK deposits and withdrawals earlier that morning after identifying signs of a potential security problem.
Upbit also restricted transfers and subsequently placed BONK under review. After about a month, however, its assessment diverged from Bithumb’s. Upbit concluded that unresolved security and disclosure concerns remained significant enough to terminate trading support, while Bithumb said the original grounds for caution had been addressed.
Upbit is not alone in delisting the token. Coinone also ended BONK trading at 15:00 KST on September 7 after putting the asset under caution in July over the same broad combination of an unresolved security incident and inadequate disclosure of material information. Coinone’s withdrawal support is scheduled to end on October 7.
That leaves an unusually visible split among Korean exchanges: Upbit and Coinone have concluded that continued trading support is no longer appropriate, while Bithumb has concluded that BONK can remain available without a caution designation.
The original trigger was an attack against BonkDAO, the decentralized autonomous organization connected to the BONK ecosystem.
On July 6, BonkDAO disclosed that a malicious governance proposal had resulted in approximately $20 million worth of BONK being removed from its treasury. The stolen tokens subsequently began moving toward centralized exchanges, prompting immediate concerns over both the security of the DAO’s governance system and potential selling pressure.
The mechanics of the attack made the incident particularly unusual.
The attacker reportedly spent approximately $4.4 million acquiring enough voting power to satisfy the DAO’s governance threshold. A proposal was then passed with 99.9% support, allowing BONK held by the treasury to be transferred to a wallet controlled by the attacker. The incident highlighted a vulnerability inherent in token-weighted governance systems when voting participation is low enough for an outside party to purchase decisive influence.
The attack quickly became more than a technical problem for Korean exchanges. Their July notices also focused on whether sufficiently important information about the incident had been communicated to investors, making disclosure practices part of the review rather than judging BONK solely on whether the affected wallet or governance mechanism had been secured.
The differing conclusions matter because Upbit and Bithumb dominate Korean crypto trading.
Recent market data illustrates the scale of that concentration. Upbit controlled 77.8% of trading across South Korea’s won-based exchanges on August 24, while Bithumb accounted for 19.8%, according to CoinGecko data cited by the Seoul Economic Daily. Market shares fluctuate materially from day to day, but the two exchanges consistently account for the overwhelming majority of domestic activity.
In July, Upbit and Bithumb together handled more than 90% of trading among the country’s major exchanges, according to data reported by Yonhap.
For BONK, that means the Korean market has not disappeared altogether. Instead, liquidity has been divided by a disagreement over whether the risks that prompted the original intervention have actually been fixed.
The Real Story Is the Disagreement Between the Exchanges
The BONK delisting is more interesting as a regulatory and market-structure story than as another memecoin losing an exchange listing.
Three exchanges can look at essentially the same event and still reach different conclusions.
That is what happened here.
The starting point was remarkably consistent. Upbit, Bithumb and Coinone all reacted to the BonkDAO incident in July. The security problem was visible, the amount involved was material, and questions existed over how the incident was communicated.
A month later, the consensus disappeared.
Bithumb effectively said: the problem has been addressed sufficiently to remove the warning.
Upbit and Coinone effectively said: it has not.
That distinction raises an important question about how South Korea’s increasingly standardized exchange-review framework works in practice.
Korean exchanges have moved toward common trading-support standards under the Digital Asset Exchange Alliance, or DAXA. The Financial Services Commission has supported industry efforts to establish standardized requirements around listing reviews, procedures and disclosure.
Common rules, however, do not necessarily produce common judgments.
A security incident is relatively easy to identify. Determining when that incident has been “resolved” is much more subjective.
Was the vulnerability that enabled the governance takeover removed? Are treasury controls now sufficient? Were the stolen assets recovered? Has the project provided enough information to investors? Has governance itself changed enough to prevent a repeat?
Two review committees can examine those questions and put different weights on the answers.
BONK now provides a clean real-world example of that discretion.
There is also a commercial dimension.
Upbit can afford to take a relatively conservative position because of its enormous domestic liquidity advantage. Bithumb’s decision to retain BONK means it becomes the most obvious major Korean venue for traders who still want won-denominated exposure to the token.
That does not mean Bithumb necessarily kept BONK for commercial reasons; its notice explicitly says it judged the caution grounds to have been resolved. But the practical consequence is clear: Korean BONK trading that previously took place on Upbit or Coinone now has fewer domestic destinations, and Bithumb stands to capture some of that activity.
The split may therefore become more important than BONK itself.
If major Korean exchanges increasingly make different calls after initially coordinating caution designations, traders will need to stop treating a DAXA-related warning as a predictable path toward either universal reinstatement or universal delisting.
It can instead become the beginning of separate exchange-level judgments.
For BONK holders, the immediate issue is straightforward. Upbit trading is finished, and the relevant remaining deadline there is October 7 for withdrawals.
For the Korean crypto industry, the harder question remains unresolved: what exactly does one exchange need to see before a $20 million security and governance incident is considered fixed when another major exchange looking at the same case still believes it is serious enough to delist the asset?
That disagreement, rather than today’s removal of two BONK trading pairs, is what makes this delisting worth watching.